Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Indian in Korea

This is yet another blog about food because that seems to be my life as of late; cooking, eating, blogging, recipe researching on foodgawker.com, grocery shopping, cooking, eating... it never ends and I love it!

I've waited patiently to have this meal. The ingredients are from near and far and well worth it. While I was home I did a little shopping at Mediterranean Island Foods store, what a wonderful place. They have everything, a small, well priced produce section, deli with meats, cheeses, and other delicatessens, and oh the fresh baked goods in particular the fresh bread of all shapes and sizes are to die for! This particular trip I spent some quality time in the spice aisles with my mom. They have these wonderful spice mixes for almost any Indian/Pakistani dish. One of my favorites is butter chicken (murgh makhani in Urdu). Its a delightful tomato, cream, and butter based melt in your mouth chicken dish served over rice with side basket of smoky buttery delicious Naan. I have dreams about meals like that and its not often I have the opportunity to indulge. I ended up buying several boxes of spice mixes in hopes of being able to change things up when I headed back to Korea.

Korea does have some version of curry, however, I dearly beg to differ. It hardly resembles curry in the mouth-watering versions that I grew up with and it sure doesn't come close to tasting like them either. They have general vegetable, chicken, and beef flavors and they all have practically the same sauce which is extremely viscous, a hideous shade of brown, and utterly lacking the vibrant flavors Indian cooking is known for.

The menu for this evening: Butter chicken, rice, naan.

I've already gotten a few questions as to where we found Naan in Korea. This was 100% my dearest huzby. The last time we went to Emart (E-maht-ah! as they say here) we wondered down the "baking" aisle and he handed me this box with a silly grin on his face. My first thought was how could this be wrecked by Koreanization, but even so we decided to give it a try and am I ever glad we did.

Naan box mix!


Couldn't read the instructions whatsoever so I followed the pics and a bit of common sense.


Here is the Butter chicken spice mix for all of about a dollar. I only used 1/2 the box to make enough for dinner for two and several left over lunches for ME.


English and Urdu directions (which I didn't exactly follow because whats the fun in that).


Naan dough... what a mess, I with out thinking piled the rolled out pieces of dough onto each other and sure enough they pretty much melted back together into a pile of dough so I had to roll them out again. Lesson learned.


I fried the naan in a pan with butter than sprinkled with the packet of seasoning which actually just made it that much better.


The final product... a plate full of hot buttery salty mouth-watering naan! Ben's favorite part by far.


The entire meal... should have invited friends.


My dinner in a bowl.


Ben enjoying proudly enjoying his Naan and butter chicken.


It was a fabulous meal. It was so rich neither of us could eat much. Our systems have adjusted to the little to no dairy products we enjoy here (**SARCASM alert**) ie: processed plastic cheese, fake ice cream, corn margarine, and funky milk. The butter chicken had loads of milk, cream, and fake butter in it. The calorie count for this dish I can hardly fathom but since its a once in a year kind of thing we fully indulged with complete carefree abandon, and it was totally worth it.

And the best part... there are plenty of leftovers for a few days worth of lunches for me. This is one of those meals that is even better the next day. The chicken gets all the more tender as it bathes in the sauce overnight.

We slept well last night too, we ate and promptly settled down to watch TV and passed out before we knew it. It was such a delightful meal and it filled us so full it put us straight into food comas.... and on that note...

good evening, morning, day, night where ever it may be for you...zzzzzzzzzzzzz

2 comments:

Casey said...

Looks great. :) The naan box says "gah-lic naan." Was it garlicky at all? Also, curry here blows because it's Japanese curry... which I know next to nothing about, except that it is gooey, sweet and shouldn't be called curry. :)

Benjamin + Amy said...

hahahaha gah-lic how funny, it wasn't super garlicky at all actually. There was a seasoning packet and it was just enough garlic/salt mix to make it taste authentic. I plan to get another box and make it for the last supper : ) so you guys can try it.